michael-hastings

April Fools' Day? Tomorrow? No way! That's it, we're out for the weekend to plan some cyber-pranks to do on AOL. But we won't leave you hanging without fin-de-semaine reading material. Thanks to the Observer, we've read the 131-page proposal for Newsweek reporter Michael Hastings's upcoming I Lost My Love in Baghdad, which we're told agent Andrew Wiley has sold to Random House Scribner for a cool north of a cool half-million. Far as we can tell, ILMLIB — which begins with epigraphs from Iraq General George Casey, Prussian icon Carl von Clausewitz, and "Angel of the Morning, 1960's pop song" (!!) — is some sort of experimental memoir about Green Zone romance leading up to the literal (that is, literal literal) January death of Hastings's gf Andi Parhamovich. And, yes, it is called I LOST MY LOVE IN BAGHDAD. Needless to say, this portends the end of Western civilization as such; highlights from the 75,000-word manuscript after the jump.